Because they authenticate systems, not people, and they often persist across pipelines, repositories, and cloud services. When those credentials are long-lived or broadly scoped, they become reusable access paths for attackers. Governance must cover ownership, scope, rotation, and offboarding just as it would for any other identity.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Developer tokens and API keys are not just configuration artefacts. They are machine-held credentials that can authorise code, pipelines, scripts, and services to reach production data and infrastructure. Once a token is copied into a repository, build log, container image, or ticket, it can outlive the account or workflow that created it. That makes it operationally similar to a non-human identity, with the same need for ownership, scope control, monitoring, and revocation. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 is useful here because it pushes teams to treat identity, access, and continuous risk management as a connected control problem rather than separate hygiene tasks.
The mistake many teams make is assuming a token is safe because it was issued for automation. In reality, automation is exactly where credentials spread fastest: CI/CD jobs reuse them, developers clone them locally, and services embed them into runtime settings. If no one can clearly answer who owns the key, what it can do, where it is used, and how it is retired, it behaves like an unmanaged identity. In practice, many security teams encounter token abuse only after a leaked secret has already been used for lateral movement or cloud resource access, rather than through intentional lifecycle governance.
How It Works in Practice
Developer tokens and keys behave like non-human identities because they establish a trust relationship between an application and a protected service. The service does not care whether the caller is a person or software; it only evaluates the credential, its scope, and any policy attached to it. That is why good secret governance borrows from identity management: define an owner, assign a purpose, limit permissions, set an expiry, and revoke when the workload changes. NIST guidance on secret protection and the NIST CSF both support this kind of lifecycle thinking, while OWASP Secrets Management Cheat Sheet is a practical reference for handling storage, rotation, and exposure reduction.
Operationally, the control set usually includes:
- Per-workload credentials instead of shared team secrets.
- Short-lived tokens where the platform supports them.
- Scoped permissions that match the exact service action required.
- Central inventory of issued secrets, owners, and expiry dates.
- Automated rotation and revocation tied to deployment and offboarding events.
- Detection for secret exposure in source control, logs, and build artefacts.
This is where identity and cloud security intersect. A key used by a deployment pipeline may unlock the same resources as a service account, so it should be governed as a privileged non-human identity rather than a convenience setting. MITRE ATT&CK also helps teams model the abuse path, especially when attackers harvest credentials from code repositories or pipeline output and reuse them as valid accounts. These controls tend to break down when legacy applications require static secrets because rotation, scoping, and ownership tracking become inconsistent across environments.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter secret governance often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance developer speed against credential sprawl. That tradeoff is real, especially in fast-moving CI/CD environments where service accounts, cloud access keys, and third-party API tokens all coexist. Best practice is evolving, but current guidance suggests that the more a secret can be replaced with workload identity, short-lived federation, or brokered access, the less it should be treated as a permanent asset.
There are also edge cases where the “NHI” comparison is less direct. A one-time test token in a disposable environment may not justify the same controls as a production deployment credential, but it still needs a defined owner and deletion rule. Shared vendor keys, embedded mobile-app secrets, and multi-tenant integration tokens are especially risky because the blast radius can span systems and customers. For threat modelling, MITRE ATT&CK is valuable for understanding how valid credentials are abused after initial compromise. When organisations manage both human and machine access under one governance model, they are more likely to spot these exceptions before they become incidents.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and MITRE ATT&CK address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST AI RMF set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA | Token governance is identity-aware access control for machine credentials. |
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | Developer tokens are non-human identities when they authenticate workloads and pipelines. | |
| NIST AI RMF | AI and automation systems need governed credentials for trustworthy operation. | |
| MITRE ATT&CK | T1552 | Credential access and secret discovery are common paths to token abuse. |
Inventory machine credentials, assign owners, and enforce least privilege plus rotation.
